Eamonn Holmes on This Morning
In my capacity as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, I
wrote to the chief executive of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, on 24 April to complain about its reprimand of Eamonn Holmes.
According to the regulator, the breakfast television presenter had said something that 'could have undermined people's trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream sources of public health information'. Holmes's sin, in Ofcom's eyes, was to say on ITV's This Morning that any theory running counter to the official government line - such as the one linking 5G masts and Covid-19 - deserved to be discussed in the mainstream media. This was in spite of Holmes saying the 5G conspiracy was 'not true and incredibly stupid'. Ofcom said this view - the view that such theories deserved a public hearing, not that they were in any way right or plausible - was 'ill-judged and risked undermining viewers' trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence'.
In my letter to Dame Melanie, I pointed out that if Ofcom is going to prohibit views being discussed on television that might risk undermining viewers' trust in public authorities during this crisis, that could easily be extended to anyone challenging the government's official line on a number of issues, not just the link between the virus and 5G masts. For instance, would Ofcom have reprimanded a broadcaster that challenged the
advice of Public Health England, issued on 25 February, that it was 'very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected'? That advice was supposedly based on 'scientific evidence', yet as we now know it turned out to be wrong and the fact that hospitals discharged elderly patients back into care homes without first confirming that they were not infected with Covid-19 is one of the reasons that, according to the ONS, as of 1 May,
37.4 per cent of all Covid deaths in England and Wales have occurred in care homes.
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